Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday June 16, 2014 @05:22PM
from the who's-to-blame dept.

sciencehabit (1205606) writes When the last passenger pigeon died at a zoo in 1914, the species became a cautionary tale of the dramatic impact humans can have on the world. But a new study finds that the bird experienced multiple population booms and crashes over the million years before its final demise. The sensitivity of the population to natural fluctuations, the authors argue, could have been what made it so vulnerable to extinction.

Apparently they were fairly awful creatures—flocks of a few million birds blackening the skies, decimating crops and crapping on everything.Couldn't we direct our sympathies to a more like-able creature? Wooly mammoths or great awks, perhaps?

Maybe we eradicated them and it's actually a *good* thing. It's not quite the same as how we (as a species) are still hunting the poor ortolan

Humans poisoned the crap out of it with absolutely complete regard for the future of the species. Passenger Pigeons were regarded as a menace by early settlers, like locust. And like locust, they were eliminated. Yes, Passenger Pigeons were hunted, and yes, the last few thousand were likely killed by hunters. But the first 100,000,000 million were poisoned or had their trees cut down.

Passenger Pigeons were regarded as a menace by early settlers, like locust. And like locust, they were eliminated.

To go from 136 million in 1871 to zero in 1900 (the year the last passenger pigeon was shot in the wild) would have taken a phenomenal killing effort. At that size of population the reproduction rate must have been getting on for 100 million new birds a year, and every bird killed must simply created a better chance that next year's young would survive, because they would be competing for food with a smaller flock.

Granted, the nesting areas were relatively small and therefore subject to easy destruction, bu

So yes, pigeons would have survived if people didn't kill them and destroy their habitat. Remember that favourite hunting area for them were the *nesting sites* being hit over and over again until everything was either too old to reproduce or there

Passenger pigeons had a unique roosting and nesting technique. They formed huge flocks in trees near a food source and stayed there while raising their young. When market hunters found a roost they would wait until night when the tree was full of birds and blast away with shotguns, killing thousands and destroying the nests. As the population declined there were fewer and fewer of those mass nesting sites, but when one was found it was eliminated. Eventually there weren't enough birds to form a proper colony and they couldn't nest anymore.

Too bad folks haven't done the whole mass shotgun extinction trick with the European starlings. You've never seen such a mess as when a flock of those things descends on your yard. There's something inherently wrong about looking out at your yard and seeing nothing but black where the grass should be, because they've completely blotted out the ground. And the next morning, your sidewalk is practically solid white with bird crap. Just disgusting. I don't think "invasive species" quite covers it.:-)

A protected nature reserve is protected from whom or what? From nature? From predators? No, it's protected from people. So high diversity in a nature reserve means high diversity in a zone protected from people. Same dam thing.

The rocky mountain locust wasn't eliminated intentionally, that was just habitat destruction - they needed the great plains for breeding and the farmers took care of that. The passenger pigeon was hunted the same way we hunt fish now: with nets and with little regard for conservation. They were seen as a cheap source of protein, to be fed to pigs and slaves.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was some poisoning, but that wasn't a concerted effort. Congress did made a half-assed attempt to prevent their extin

...we humans still hunted the crap out of it with absolutely no regard to the future of the species. I'd still say it was our fault.

Well, we certainly brought over the European pigeon variants of domestic, feral, ringneck, and rock dove, so it's certainly our fault for displacing them from their ecological niche with a more resilient invasive species. Somewhat the same as the English introducing Rabbits to Australia.

Funny how we don't seem to care enough about these particular invasive species to wipe them out from areas which are not their natural habitat, but we get our panties all in a bunch over other invasive species.

In discussion about potentially cloning passenger pigeons, there were concerns that the species needed huge flocks. As a result, there were concerns that cloning just a few wouldn't be enough to bring back the species.

Since this study showed that passenger pigeons had population crashes before and came back, this should alleviate the flock size concerns.

What's the deal with the spate of ideologically-driven "scientific" studies appearing in the last couple of years? The first really blatant one I am aware of was the "organic food isn't more nutritious" study, which completely deflected from the point of organic food altogether. It was obviously a piece designed to confuse lay people into thinking organic food didn't have additional health benefits over conventionally-grown food. Now we see this piece, claiming that a species genetically equipped to survive huge fluctuations in population over millions of years was really just going to go extinct anyway and we just happened to be there to see it. These people should be blacklisted from scientific journals. They're not academically honest in the slightest.

If you read the actual study, the scientists didn't say that. The article only says that the rapid population spikes and crashes the passenger pigeon experienced made it more vulnerable to humans. "Here we use both genomic and ecological analyses to show that the passenger pigeon was not always super abundant, but experienced dramatic population fluctuations, which could increase its vulnerability to human exploitation." Furthermore, the point of the study was not to suggest that humans had no effect on

Scientists like to be topical, and even when they aren't it's easy for their findings to be given a political spin or viewed through a political lens.

I don't know how respectable this research is, because I don't care enough to actually read it, and even if I did I am not remotely qualified to judge something in this field. I do know that even if the research is perfectly valid and the authors don't care about politics at all, it'll still aquire a political spin in the process of being turned into popular r

What's the deal with the spate of ideologically-driven "scientific" studies appearing in the last couple of years? The first really blatant one I am aware of was the "organic food isn't more nutritious" study, which completely deflected from the point of organic food altogether. It was obviously a piece designed to confuse lay people into thinking organic food didn't have additional health benefits over conventionally-grown food. Now we see this piece, claiming that a species genetically equipped to survive huge fluctuations in population over millions of years was really just going to go extinct anyway and we just happened to be there to see it. These people should be blacklisted from scientific journals. They're not academically honest in the slightest.

The majority of the scientific studies the media reports on are barely scientific, involve little study, and are mainly geared toward pushing ideology.It has been this way for decades.

You have it backwards, the media spins the results of science for percieved political gain, not the other way around. There is absolutely nothing political about the claim that other factors may have played a part in their extinction.

As to the organic food study: Nutrition may not be "the point" in your mind, but there were certainly plenty of charlatans promoting it, there's even a 1970's clip on YT somewhere with Feynman himself having a go at the 'unscientific' claims of better nutrition from organically grow crops. The nutritional study injected facts into a factual vacum, even if nobody was interested in the study it is still worthy of publication. Nobody denies the health benfits of washing the copper-sulphate off your industrially grown tomatos before eating them (except maybe the pesticide company), but the study presented strong evidence that a tomato is a tomato no matter where it obtains the atoms that constitute it's genetically programmed flesh.

If you're finding politics and ideology in evidence based statement like either of those studies, it's not because the scientists put it there, you did that yourself while you were looking for reasons to reject the findings.

Disclaimer: I've been a "greenie" since the 70's, if the above findings are somehow an inconviennce to green politics then so be it, I want my government to formulate laws and policies that respect evidence, and adapt when contrary evidence is found. I want our politicins to be more like our scientists and engineers, get off their ideological high horses and get on with the job.

If you're finding politics and ideology in evidence based statement like either of those studies, it's not because the scientists put it there, you did that yourself while you were looking for reasons to reject the findings.

Studies are funded by entities with biases, thus the studies have desired outcomes. The institutions that get the grants are the ones who can get the desired outcomes. It's not just the social "sciences" and hot "issues" like climate change. Even the hard sciences fall victim to this. It doesn't matter if you're trotting out an insignificant cock and bull story about why some species died or if you're hiding how many people your experimental drug killed.Science is subject to the same power dynamics as e

Science has ways of dealing with bias, influence, and impropriety. It can take a while, but it works.

Scientific institutions are usually devoted to finding things out. It's not easy to get most scientists to deliver a predetermined result, partly because people who do that tend not to become scientists, and partly because it can be devastating to one's reputation if found out. A peer-reviewed scientific paper is about as close to truthful and reliable as you're likely to get.

What's the deal with the spate of ideologically-driven "scientific" studies appearing in the last couple of years? The first really blatant one I am aware of was the "organic food isn't more nutritious" study, which completely deflected from the point of organic food altogether.

It isn't more nutritious. What it is is lacking is some key nutrition components, like Roundup.

An edible bird that was in direct competition with humans for nuts, berries, and cultivated grain happened to go extinct as these selfsame bipeds were settling a continent where the pigeons had previously flourished.

This sensationalist crap is just an excuse to get some publicity. Climate change had nothing to do with the pigeon's demise. It operates too slowly and migratory birds are not that sensitive because they can move around to find food sources.
It was hunting, greed, and avarice. Nothing more.